360 DEGREES Weblog

We’ve seen several efforts recently to bring Facebook photos into the offline world, such as HotPrints’ free, advert-supported albums. Now bringing such capabilities to brick-and-mortar stores comes a new initiative from Kodak that lets consumers print online photos from Facebook and Picasa using its in-store kiosks.

Starting this summer, users of Kodak Picture Kiosks will be able to access their web albums on Facebook and Picasa as well as Kodak’s own Kodak Gallery service. The kiosks will make 4×6in (102×152mm) prints of the photos, provided the resolution is high enough to make a quality print. Kodak says it also intends to connect with other social networking sites around the globe.

Given that more than 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook alone each month, there are plenty of opportunities for forging OFF=ON connections for consumers whose memories increasingly reside in the virtual world.

Thanks Springwise

So I realize that CF’s days are numbered, and SD will eventually win the flash card war, but for now compact flash manages to stay just one step ahead of secure digital when it comes to storage capacity. Well maybe a few steps to be exact, given Panasonic just announced a 64GB SD card, where as Silicon-Power just revealed their new 128GB CF model. The 400X card features write speeds of up to 90MB/sec allowing it to file away your monstrous RAW shots as fast as you can snap them, though there’s no word on how quickly it will snap away your hard earned cash.

Imagine you are an iconic camera company, and in your glory days your film was an essential for both fashion photographers and fashionable party-goers. You were so popular that your product’s name became synonymous with instant pictures.

Then the world turned digital, and you found yourself as washed up as the rock stars you once documented. You struggled to make yourself relevant, and failed, patronizing your loyal fans by offering them crappy product after crappy product. What do you do? You turn back the clock.

The company is, of course, Polaroid, and it is set to launch a new range of film cameras. After its hideous attempts to combine a digital camera and a printer in a single (huge) box, the company will step back in time and make cameras which use Polaroid 1000 film. The range is called PIC-1000, and the devices resemble the Polaroids of yesteryear.

This makes perfect sense. The Polaroid’s USP was instant prints. The odd quality of those prints were what made it an icon. And if film handles it so well, why even bother changing to digital which is, in this case, clearly inferior? Sure, Polaroid will never be the mass market success it once was, but there’s a good, retro niche for weird analog cameras, currently occupied by Lomo.

The cameras should go on sale this year. They will have flash, red-eye reduction and even a self timer, and come in wood-effect or blobby silver. Price TBA.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/#ixzz0cToV72RN

I’m not quite sure how they do it, but Eye-Fi manages to keep on cramming feature after useful into their wireless memory cards. This time around, they’re introducing a new tier of card (above Pro), the Pro X2. It costs $150, but at least read about what it does before you scoff at the price… The X2 is an 8 gig SDHC card with a built-in 802.11n antenna. N! N means faster uploads at greater distances, so that’s definitely good. And more storage is good too. But the most useful feature of the X2 is the option to have the card delete pictures after it uploads them, giving you an infinite amount of memory (provided you’re near some source of WiFi) while sharing and backing up your pictures real time. The card won’t delete anything until it’s confirmed that the upload was successful, but hypothetically, you can just stop worrying about whether or not you’re running out of space when taking pictures (or videos).

The X2 also comes with all the rest of the awesome Eye-Fi features, like RAW support, geotagging, ad-hoc WiFi connections, and Wayport WiFi access.

Thanks Ohgizmo

There’s no denying the value of a professional wedding photographer, but that’s not to say that guests don’t sometimes snap some gems of their own. Aiming to give newlyweds a place to gather all those amateur treasures, Olapic is a Columbia Business School startup that allows users to easily gather, share and print guests’ pictures from their special day.

Couples begin by creating a profile on Olapic and uploading the email addresses of their guests; Olapic then reminds everyone to bring their cameras to the wedding. After the big event, the site will stay in touch with guests via emails and cards to remind them to upload their pictures. Once they do, the pictures remain private until the happy couple decides to make them public, whether on Olapic or on their Facebook, Flickr or Picasa accounts. Unlike most social networking sites, Olapic allows not just those strict privacy controls but also bulk downloads of high-quality pictures; it also offers printing services to generate albums and prints. Couples can try Olapic for free for up to 100 photos. After that, a flat fee of USD 99 includes unlimited photo storage for a year (annual renewals are USD 25) along with 100 high-quality reminder cards to give to guests. Olapic also gives professional photographers the opportunity to offer additional services by incorporating guests’ photos into their own offerings.

Clearly targeted at consumers who are living a more extreme lifestyle than I do, the new Casio EX-G1 features a shock-resistant shell allowing it to survive drops from as high as 7 feet, or being submerged up to 10 feet underwater for as long as an hour. The waterproof seal also keeps out dust, and the camera is rated to survive temperatures as cold as -10 °C, which isn’t actually that cold, though it is below freezing.

As for tech specs, the EX-G1 features a 12.1MP sensor that’s also able to capture 30fps AVI videos at 848×480, 3X optical zoom using an internal mechanism so the lens doesn’t actually extend from the body, and all the other features you’d expect to find on a reasonably equipped P&S digital camera these days. The choice to use microSDHC and microSD memory cards is a bit odd, though I imagine it helps keep the camera compact.

The Casio EX-G1 should be hitting shelves sometime in December of this year in black or red for $299.99.

The limited edition Leica M7 Edition Hermès will capture memorable pictures for £8550 soon. Designed by renowned fashion house Hermès, only 200 of this exclusive edition of Leica UK’s classic 35mm rangefinder system camera will be available. To be precise, 100 in trade mark Hermès orange and 100 in a green called ‘etoupe’. Certainly this line is tweaked with enhanced features. The company has revealed to BJP that the top plate is engraved with the Leica name in classic script: the red Leica logo has been omitted to preserve the color harmony of the leather covering.

Aimed at the educational market, the BigShot is simply a DIY digital camera kit that allows kids to learn about its inner workings. The camera “can be powered with a battery or with a dynamo, where 6 cranks = 1 picture.”

Photography is not my forte but if you are a photography enthusiast and are interested in the latest hi-tech camera’s you will surely love the EPIC-X camera from RED. No release date has been given for this camera but we hear this digital still and motion camera is priced expensively at $28,000. The first of the two models that we can expect to see is the incredibly high-end EPIC-X which will be released in four stages, beginning with a pre-production model dubbed TATTOO and ending with the wide-spread final release model. A sleek camera to cap

With the iPhone 3GS, the possibilities are endless. In July 2009, Harold Smith and Graham Mcbain took the iPhone 3GS, and made the first prototype of the OWLE Bubo, which we covered on CrunchGear. Now, just four months later, the OWLE Bubo is ready to ship to the public. OWLE, which stands for Optical Widgets for Life Enhancement, is aiming to making mobile video much easier, by taking the parts you use on your camcorder, and enabling you to use them on the iPhone.

The Bubo comes standard with a hotshoe mount on top for LED lights, four tripod mounts and standard 37mm lens threading so that you can put your own lenses on it, in addition to the lens that the Bubo comes with.

It’s been quite a journey since the first prototype of the Bubo — Harold and Graham traveled to Yahoo!’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. for iPhoneDevCamp 3, where they won the iFund “Most Promising Startup” award.

The Bubo is going on sale for pre-orders starting tomorrow for $99.95